The Flavor of Your Comfort
by slyprentice
Summary: It starts sometime during grade school when Will's clothes are still baggy enough to hide his knobby knees and the strangely hollow dip that is his stomach. Hannibal/Will.


**Title: **The Flavor of Your Comfort**  
Author:** Prentice  
**Rating**: Mature  
**Fandom**: Hannibal (TV)  
**Pairing**: Hannibal/Will  
**Warning**: **_Canon-typical gore/violence/cannibalism. Eating disorders. Body image issues. Underweight!Will._**  
**Notes**: _This is a response to a prompt over on the hannibal kink meme that asked for undernourishment leading to defensive eating in Will and Hannibal finding out about it. I went a few steps further than what the original prompter asked for but hopefully I can cover all their bonuses. :)_

**Summary**: It starts sometime during grade school when Will's clothes are still baggy enough to hide his knobby knees and the strangely hollow dip that is his stomach.

* * *

It starts sometime during grade school when Will's clothes are still baggy enough to hide his knobby knees and the strangely hollow dip that is his stomach. It's not normal he knows, the way his fingers tremble around his Styrofoam lunch tray, the smell of overcooked meatloaf and soggy green beans making his stomach ache, but it is what it is and he'll have to make do. Make do and get used to it.

Not because he wants to but because he has to. Has to because even though his father works hard, picking up double and triple shifts down at the docks where he can, it's still not enough to feed their little family. Still not enough to buy more than beans and rice and the occasional discounted fruit or vegetable that he can cut the bad parts off of and eat, fingers shaking around each piece.

It's not so bad for the most part, really. At least in those first few years, when Will can eat his school lunch slowly, appreciating every single bite and never turning his nose up at the fattiest of chicken legs or the soggiest of fries. He'll eat anything, he finds, once he's hungry enough. From the most wilted of lettuce to the hardest of pieces of bread, teeth and tongue biting and sucking feverishly at every morsel, and if he's quietly envious of every other child in his class who comes to school with neatly packed lunch boxes full of peanut butter and jelly, apples and carrot sticks – well, no one has to know.

They're just lucky, he tells himself, trying his best to ignore that ugly dark twist in the middle of his stomach whenever he notices another kid find an extra pack of cookies hidden away in their lunch box, crowing at their find. And not everyone can be lucky. Just like not everyone can know what it's like to do without, to go home to an empty house with empty cupboards, body shaky with exhaustion and hunger.

They don't know – they _can't_ know – what it's like and that's okay because it's not so bad. It's really not so bad. He tells himself that all the time, every day, just as a reminder.

It's not so bad.

And, anyway, he's small for his age – tiny, really; the forms of malnourished digging in around his ribs and spine – and he doesn't need that much. One good meal a day can be enough for him, it can be, and even if he sometimes goes to bed with his stomach burning, aching to be filled…well. Well, that's all right. He can live with that, can learn to get used to it, and he does, mostly, get used to it.

His stomach slowly stops aching so much. He only shakes sometimes, mostly at night, and those meals at school – he draws them out for as long as he can. Sucks out the marrow from the bones of the chicken legs, smiles sweetly at the lunch lady for an extra scoop of limp green beans, and learns to save those rock-like pieces of bread for after school snacks that he can suck on and suck on and make them last that much longer.

It gets easier, too, once he learns those tricks. Learns them and grows and gets used to it. Until things change – which they do – for the worst while he's dragging himself through junior high and high school. Too old now to be considered something as sweetly innocuous as 'tiny', he's sneered at for being 'scrawny', hounded at for being 'thin'. No, not just 'thin', but 'dangerously underweight'.

'You need to eat more, Will,' one of the school nurses' advises, disapproval coloring her tone when he winds up in her office, bottom lip busted from where he was slammed up against a row of lockers, the sound of braying laughter reverberating in his ears. 'You're nothing but skin and bones.'

There's nothing he can say to that – he does need to eat more, _wants_ to eat more – but how can he explain that? He can't, not really, not fully. Not without explaining his home life – an empty house with empty cupboards – or the way the other boys – bigger and better fed than he ever will be – almost always manage to knock his lunch tray from his hands; take his food from him with a careless cruelty that makes that same ugly thing inside of him twist and clench, bile burning hard in the back of his throat, head dizzy and disoriented.

He learns, though. He _learns_ and he gets used to it. Gets used to the bruises and the blood, the burning-ache of a perpetually empty belly and eating his food so fast that his stomach aches for an entirely different reason, barely chewing or tasting any of it because he's hungry, so fucking _hungry_, all the time that he can barely even tell anymore.

By the time he leaves for college – on a scholarship that drags him far away from that empty house with those empty cupboards and a father who's still trying to make ends meet and who's so fucking _relieved_ to not have another mouth to feed he celebrates by giving Will the only hug that he can ever remember receiving – he doesn't even notice it anymore. The way he eats and the way he doesn't. It doesn't really register, not anymore.

Not unless someone points it out – 'Jesus fucking Christ, _chew_ your food, Will'; 'it's not going to disappear, Graham, don't be _disgusting'_ – but that becomes less and less frequent. He's the odd one, after all. The poor southern boy who somehow finds his way into the FBI, so full of idiosyncrasies that his eating habits are the very last thing that people tend to notice about him.

If they notice at all, that is.

Most don't – he rarely eats in front of others if he can help it; passes on offers of shared meals or dinners out because when he eats, he _eats_. Gorges himself once a day until he feels sick, afraid that he'll wake up one day and it'll all go back to the way it used to be, before he made a paycheck, one that was large enough to pay for good food, real food. Food that fills the hollow places inside of him and makes him feel – broken, maybe, and just a little sick but good, too, because he can have it, can't he?

He doesn't have to be hungry – is he hungry? - he can't tell anymore – but he doesn't have to be because he can eat now, even if there's a crawling panic in his chest every time he does that makes him think that maybe this time he won't be able to. That it'll all go away again. That he'll forget to eat like he sometimes does and someone will come and take it from him because he doesn't appreciate it.

But that's – that's silly. It's irrational. He knows that. He _does_.

It's just – he remembers, sometimes, what it was like to have nothing. To come home to an empty house and go to bed with his stomach growling and gurgling only to wake up weak and disoriented. To drag himself out of bed and go to school, where well-fed boys pushed him and bruised him, preying on the weak because they could get away with it.

It – they – those memories are close to him. Always close to him. Lurking in the back of his mind, even when he loses himself in the mind of another, chasing down the hunger in _their_ minds, _their_ thoughts, and laying their appetites open to Jack Crawford, who sometimes reminds Will of those boys - those bullies – back in school, who'd steal his meal out from under him if he wasn't careful.

And possibly Jack knows that – or knows _something_ – because he never comments, never questions, when Will disappears, a pile of food with him, to eat in his office until he's sick, the burn of something that might be tears stinging behind his eyelids.

TBC


End file.
